MOVIE REVIEW: Eastern Promises

by LuLu LaRue


Eastern Promises is a movie about naked hot dudes rolling around on the floor. Actually, there's just one naked hot dude that rolls around on the floor. And actually, it's just one scene where he's doing that. But the naked hot dude is Aragorn and he's bedecked with tattoos, and now we know for a fact that god exists.

Naomi Watts plays a goody-goody nurse, who's pretty annoying, but her hair looks like shit, so you gotta feel kinda bad for her. Also, she's playing a character who was written with no layers or motivation, so everything she does seems like she just woke up yesterday. She and Aragorn are in London. It's always dark. Apparently, a really, really big black cloud has taken over the city.

This other lady is pregnant, dies, the baby lives, is in the hospital, Naomi takes care of the baby all the time because, evidently, there are no other patients in this city hospital, and while reading the baby's mother's diary, wherein the Russian mob is implicated in various forms of horribleness that have, we are to assume, led to the mother's death, Naomi picks a fight with the mob, because that's what you do when you're a nurse--you pick fights with mobsters.

As you can imagine, the Russian mob in London is scared shitless of her. She does, after all, stutter a lot. Perhaps she was also thinking that if you stare at someone enough, they will wilt from your self-righteous gaze. But, no, the Russian mob has had extensive training in self-righteous-gaze avoidance, and so they carry on with their Russian mob business, which has something to do with a restaurant that has elaborate birthday parties for old women, lots of chocolate, and painful ways to die. Also, there's vodka.

Aragorn is hot as hell. He's also the #2 dude in the mob, except for the son of the #1 dude, but the son is a drunk and a bad actor, so hopefully he'll get a construction job in Idaho and move on. The #1 dude is a raging douchebag, tries to get the drunk son to drown the baby, the drunk son grows a conscience at precisely the moment when he's standing at the water's edge, at which point Naomi and Aragorn show up and stop him and then there's a touching scene where Aragorn and Naomi coo over the baby and then they kiss, because you are supposed to kiss strangers when you coo with them over a baby. Also, Aragorn is an undercover cop, so you're allowed to like him now.

There are a lot of close-up scenes of blood and chopped off fingers, which should give everyone great ideas for Halloween. Also, everything that was chopped off or bleeding looked like a wax candle with ketchup, which is quite original.

In the end, both Naomi and the baby are wearing white frilly dresses and the sun was out. This is great news, as I was terribly worried some sort of meteorological disaster had struck London. Aragorn does not show up in a white frilly dress. He does take over the mob, I think we are to assume. And that is the story of how the police and the criminals ended up bedfellows.

Wait until this movie comes out on DVD, then watch it when you're drunk and you're gonna pass out anyway.